How can I cycle through a mix of images and videos in a WPF application?

Question

I have a WPF Kiosk application and it has a background timer that will redirect the user back to the home page when there is no user activity. When the Kiosk is sitting on the home page for an extended period of time, I want it to have some sort of screensaver. The screensaver would basically have to pull images/videos/flash files from a folder and automatically cycle through them repeatedly until a user is active again.

The dispatch timer should be easy enough to handle the idling, but my question is what is the best way to handle the cycling of the images/videos? Is there a control that will do this for me? I'm sure I can load all of the images and videos, but I'm not sure how to display them to the user in WPF.

I'd need to display the image for a few seconds each, but videos or flash files need to play to completion before being swapped out.

Answer 1

I believe that you'll need to handle each of these cases separately. I assume that you know how to use an Image element, so I won't provide a link to that.

For media files, you can use the built-in Media Element class, which supports WMV and MPG files, and has properties and events for all that you would expect it to (play/pause/stop, Media ended, etc.).

For Flash, it gets a little trickier, as there is no built-in support for this that I'm aware of. Here is an MSDN thread that discusses how to do this.